Congratulations to the research team of Dr Minh Bui and Dr Robert Lanfear from The Australian National University, who were recently awarded the Australian Research Data Commons Eureka Prize for Excellence in Research Software.
Dr Bui, an NCI user, combined his computer science expertise with Dr Lanfear’s biology expertise to together develop a free piece of open-source software allowing researchers to infer evolutionary insights from DNA sequences. The highly performant and user-friendly software, IQ-TREE2, was used all over the world by thousands of research teams to track the emergence and spread of COVID-19 variants during the pandemic.
IQ-TREE2 was developed using supercomputing resources at NCI, and updates are currently in development. This software tool made Dr Bui one of the world’s most cited researchers in 2021, and it is now being used as an integral part of the large global software ecosystem of biomedical research.
NCI is proud to be home to researchers conducting life-changing science. By leveraging large computing and data storage, and welcoming diverse and innovative research projects, NCI continues to enable important discoveries in all fields of science.
Read more about this work on the ANU website.
